Recently I installed the famous otf font inconsolata by emerging it.
Then I tried to apply it to my emacs by adding the following line to .Xresources.
emacs.font : inconsolata:style=medium
which gave me the error:
Font 'inconsolata:style=medium' is not defined.

I somehow figured out that emacs font can't be configured by fontconfig library.
Instead it follows the XLFD config. So I tried to find inconsolata by:
xlsfonts
but inconsolata is not there.

Then I tried to manually add the inconsolata font dir by
xset +fp /usr/share/fonts/inconsolata
xset fp rehash
All these finished without any error message but still, I can't find inconsolata
in the output of xlsfonts...

btw, the only reason I could figure out is that, the xlsfonts and xfontsel package
on my gentoo was installed manually after xserver is installed.
So I guess there may be some dependency problem ?
And I knew that Xorg will contain much more packages than xserver. Maybe some
necessary packages were missed in xserver??

I've also installed xlsfonts manually. This program is barely needed these days. Portage is very good at tracing dependencies so, your problem definitely has nothing to do with that. Did you make sure that xset has added your font path? Try to run "xset q" and see what is in your FontPath. I can't offer anything else. As I said, everything works for me, so I can't help with searching.

I have excatly the same problem, both xfontsel and xlsfonts fail to detect any of my fonts ("fixed" is the only one they can see).
I tried xset +fp with paths to my fonts (in both /usr/share/fonts and ~/.fonts) and xset rehash, but this doesn't work.

Before I manually add font paths, xset q shows only:

Code:

$ xset q
(...)
Font Path:
built-ins
(...)

I don't know if this is how it should be in Gentoo (in Debian, there're full font paths in there)

I have excatly the same problem, both xfontsel and xlsfonts fail to detect any of my fonts ("fixed" is the only one they can see).
I don't know if this is how it should be in Gentoo (in Debian, there're full font paths in there)

In general, the FontPath is populated by providing section Files in xorg.conf. Nowadays people run Xorg without any configuration file, so no wonder that FontPath stays empty. You can try to create /etc/X11/xorg.conf (or /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/fonts.conf) and put there

Then you have to specify which fonts you are missing. It might be that those fonts are not supported by xlsfonts. BTW, why do you need these programs to work? As far as I know, most (if not all) applications now support Fontconfig.